Is Netflix worth it?

It is if your household watches it often enough to justify the price, and you can count that rather than guess. Set every profile's viewing activity beside a year of Netflix charges from your bank statement.

Mind My Money reads every profile's viewing activity and puts it beside what you paid before it asks whether to keep it.

This is for anyone paying for Netflix and not sure the household still uses it. The figures below are from our own household's accounts, read on 24 September 2026.

It is a question about your house, not the catalogue

Most of what you will read about whether Netflix is worth it is an argument about the library, the price rises and the adverts, and none of it can answer the question for you, because the only thing that decides it is how much the people in your house actually watch. That is not a matter of opinion. Netflix keeps a record of everything each profile has started, and your bank statement has what you paid for it, so the answer is sitting in two places you can already open.

What it showed when we checked ours

We ran it on our own household: five profiles, and the thirteen months from September 2025 to September 2026. Across all five, 1,009 titles or episodes were started. The busiest profile, the one the children share, had something playing on 205 of the 388 days. One profile had nothing at all.

On the other side, the bank statement had thirteen Netflix charges, €17.99 eleven times and then €19.99 from August 2026, when the price went up by 11 per cent. That is €237.87 for the period, which works out at about 24 cents for every title or episode started, so we kept it.

What mattered more than the total was the spread. Most of the watching was one profile, most days, and anyone in the house who looked only at their own viewing would have underestimated it by a long way.

How to check yours

  1. Sign in to Netflix in a browser, open your account, and go to Viewing activity for each profile in turn. It is kept per profile, so a household has to read every one of them, not only the account holder's.
  2. At the bottom of each list, Download all gives you a spreadsheet of what that profile watched, one row per title or episode with the date.
  3. Count, per profile, the titles in each month and the number of days with anything at all. Days are a better measure than titles, because one evening of a series is fifteen rows.
  4. From your bank statement, list every Netflix charge for the same months. Look for a rise partway through; ours was in August.
  5. Divide what you paid by what was watched, and look at the months with nothing in them. A year with four empty months is a year you could have paused it for four months.

One thing the spreadsheet will not give you is hours. It has titles and dates, not how long anything played, so any tool that shows your Netflix hours from that file is estimating them. Real durations only come in the full copy of your data, which you request from Netflix and which Netflix says “may take up to 30 days”. For deciding whether to keep it, days and titles are enough.

If the numbers say it isn't worth it

Cancelling costs you less than it looks, because Netflix keeps your viewing activity, ratings and recommendations for 24 months after the account closes, and brings them back if you rejoin inside that time. If you want the history itself rather than the promise of it, download each profile's spreadsheet before you cancel, because once the account is inactive the full data request is the only way left.

The steps to cancel, including when Netflix is billed through Apple or a phone or TV provider, are on how to cancel Netflix.

How Mind My Money does this

Mind My Money goes through a year of your payments on your own computer and lists the ones that repeat. For a streaming service it does what is described above before it asks you anything: it opens the service's own viewing activity in a browser you are signed in to, reads every profile, and puts the use beside what you paid, so the question it asks is whether to keep something you now know the numbers for.

Any bank you can sign in to

See what you actually use.

Runs on your own computer. Pay what you decide, including nothing.

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